Go now across the heath and see the change forty years have wrought.  You shall seek in vain the lonely shepherd with his stocking.  The stocking has grown into an organized industry.  In grandfather’s day the farmer and his household “knitted for the taxes”; if all hands made enough in the twelvemonth to pay the tax-gatherer, they had done well.  Last year the single county of Hammerum, of which more below, sold machine-made underwear to the value of over a million and a half kroner.  The sheep are there, but no longer lean; no more the ling-thatched hut, but prosperous farms backed by thrifty groves, with hollyhock and marigold in the dooryards, heaps of gray marl in the fields, tiny rivulets of water singing the doom of the heath in the sand; for where it comes the heather moves out.  A resolute, thrifty peasantry looks hopefully forward.  Not all of the heath is conquered yet.  Roughly speaking, thirty-three hundred square miles of heath confronted Dalgas in 1866.  Just about a thousand remain for those who come after to wrestle with; but already voices are raised pleading that some of it be preserved untouched for its natural beauty, while yet it is time.

Meanwhile the plow goes over fresh acres every year—­once, twice, then a deeper plowing, this time to break the stony crust, and the heath is ready for its human mission.  From the Society’s nurseries that are scattered through the country come thousands of tiny trees, and are set out in the furrows, two of the spruce for each dwarf pine till the nurse has done her work.  Then she is turned into charcoal, into tar, and a score of other things of use.  The men who do the planting in summer find chopping to do in winter in the older plantations, at good wages.  Money is flowing into the moor in the wake of the water and the marl.  Roads are being made, and every day the mail-carrier comes.  In the olden time a stranger straying into the heath often brought the first news of the world without for weeks together.  Game is coming, too,—­roebuck and deer,—­in the young forests.  The climate itself is changing; more rain falls in midsummer, when it is needed.  The sand-blast has been checked, the power of the west wind broken.  The shrivelled soil once more takes up and holds the rains, and the streams will deepen, fish leap in them as of yore.  Groves of beech and oak are springing up in the shelter of their hardier evergreen kin.  “Make the land furry,” Dalgas said, with prophetic eye beholding great forests taking the place of sand and heather, and in his lifetime the change was wrought that is transforming the barren moor into the home-land of a prosperous people.

To the most unlikely of places, through the very prison doors, his gospel of hope has made its way.  For the last dozen years the life prisoners in the Horsens penitentiary have been employed in breaking and reforesting the heath, and their keepers report that the effect upon them of the hard work in the open has been to notably cheer and brighten them.  The discipline has been excellent.  There have been few attempts at escape, and they have come to nothing through the vigilance of the other prisoners.